1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to computer systems and particularly to the display of how much a file has changed between one time when a user viewed the file and a subsequent time.
2. Description of Related Art
Users are faced with increasing information overload, especially when using the worldwide web portion of the internet (WWW) which has hundreds of thousands of web sites and millions of web pages. Users often wish to monitor an information source, such as a web page, for changing information but do not have time to manually look at the source at regular intervals.
The Netscape Navigator.TM. has a feature called "What's New" that works on a user-defined set of bookmarks. The feature connects to all of the web pages included in the user's bookmark list and checks each one to determine whether its modification date is more recent than the last time the user saw the page. This method does not allow a user to estimate how "much" the page has changed. In fact, any change, no matter how minimal (e.g., correcting a typo), is treated the same, and the modification date may actually have changed without "any" changes in the document (e.g., if a comment was changed or if the file was overwritten for some reason).